Wednesday, February 4, 2015

I beat Bricks for the first time

I finished the last level of Bricks within the allotted 20 minutes for the first time. Pretty cool.

I'm going to use that to plot my progress. I'm going to plot the days in which I beat the game and see if I can find a pattern. As I beat the game more and more, I'm going to make it a challenge to see how quickly I can beat it.

There is something weird that I noticed happening. Today, I got to the last level very quickly. I just plowed through all of the levels like it was nothing. I had about five minutes left for the last level, then I started sucking when it came to destroying the last few bricks. It was odd. It was like my reference was gone.

The game works testing your ability to resolve the relationship between the ball and the paddle. The more accurately you can judge their location, the more control you have over the ball. If you want to hit the ball to the left, you have to hit it with the left side of the paddle. To hit it up, you have to hit the ball with the top end of the paddle, and so on. Well, sometimes I have to cheat, because in some areas of the screen, I hit the ball as though I'm not hitting it at all. I know where it's supposed to be. I'm strong in some areas. And in some areas, it's really unpredictable. Like I'll hit it thinking that it should go relatively straight, when in fact I hit it with the very extreme edge of the paddle, causing the ball to go to the extreme left or right.

Weird. I think what may be going on is that my vision is getting stronger and I'm coming to trust my visual input more. That has helped me get further in the game. But not all areas of my vision are good, and my pseudo-fusion, let's call it, combined with my increasing trust in my visual cues, sometimes completely throws me off. Weird stuff. So I beat the game one day last week. Since then I have been plowing through the game. It will feel as though I am going to beat the game easily because I have so much time left to finish the last level. Then the last few bricks come, and I have a hell of a time with it, and for some reason I just can't do it! Weird. It'll come again. I'm counting on it to happen again and become more easy. We'll find out.

"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." - Ralph Waldo Emerson